OODLs (Observations on Daily Life)

Poor Mercury. It seems like every time there is a communication or technology foul-up, or whenever people are just acting weird, the planet closest to the sun is the prime suspect. If a quick check of the website  www.ismercuryinretrograde.com  yields a positive response, that cinches it. Mercury is responsible. And when Mercury is retrograde, there's nothing you can do but sit back and ride it out. Brief astrology (and astronomy) lesson: Whenever a planet goes retrograde (some say "in retrograde," but this is grammatically incorrect) it appears to move backward across the sky. All planets go retrograde from time to time. They aren't actually moving backward - it just looks like they are because of how their orbit around the sun looks to us here on Earth. Astrologically speaking, the planet Mercury is thought to control communication. In mythology, the god Mercury was a messenger (he was known as Hermes to the Greeks...and he was a trickster to boot.) T...

I used to be obsessed with keeping everyone happy. My thinking seemed logical: If everyone was happy, there would be harmony, and everyone's lives would be easier as a result. Including mine. This obsession continued for decades. I became something of a master at making [almost] everyone happy. As you might have guessed, I was the [almost]. There were times when I did successfully make everyone happy, there was harmony, and life was easy for everyone. The problem was, those times were very rare. Usually, I felt like I was holding a giant, knotted, sparking ball of livewires, playing the world's most sadistic game of Twister while I tried to keep the ends from touching and blowing up the whole thing. I can't tell you when enough became enough or when I finally understood the adage "If you try to please everyone, you please no one" was a truism and not a challenge. And I won't lie and say I have it all figured out now and never fall back into that...